Need to engage our worthy rivals

BY MIKE NDUKWE

While I appreciate and congratulate Government and the NCDC for taking us this far, I think we should swallow our pride now and engage Ghana/South Africa on how to make our testing more efficient. That is the most sensible thing to do right now if we dream of flattening the infection curve anytime soon or relaxing the lockdown. Common sense should let us know that the more tests we carryout, the higher our chances of isolating infected people that will continue to increase rate of spread.

In the real world, ‘worthy rivals’ learn from themselves to improve. We should take advantage of the progress those two countries have made in the area of testing and even management of mortality per outcome.

South Africa ??
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Total Cases: 4,361
Total Recovered: 1,473
Total Deaths: 86
Active Cases: 2,802
#MortalityRate per outcome: 5.52%
#TotalTests: 161,004
#TestsPer1Mpopulation: 2,715

Ghana ??
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Total Cases: 1,279
Total Recovered: 134
Total Deaths: 10
Active Cases: 1,135
#MortalityRate per outcome: 6.94%
#TotalTests: 88,188
#TestsPer1Mpopulation: 2,838

Nigeria ??
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Total Cases: 1,182
Total Recovered: 222
Total Deaths: 35
Active Cases: 925
#MortalityRate per outcome: 13.62%
#TotalTests: 10,061
#TestsPer1Mpopulation: 49

Source: worldometers.info

Note: I have not even factored in the suspicious deaths in Kano state which if finally confirmed to be related to COVID-19, could spell doom for not only Kano but the rest of Nigeria.